First public version of Docear released (1.0 Beta 1)

First public version of Docear released (1.0 Beta 1)

Today, on February 15th, 2012 we released the first public version of Docear. It’s a Beta version and still has some bugs and missing features but overall it will give you a thorough impression of what we consider an academic literature suite should be.

The main idea behind Docear is that you annotate everything you consider important in a PDF. That means, you highlight text, write comments, or create bookmarks in the PDF. To create bookmarks and comments, you can use almost any PDF reader (highlighting text is a bit more complicated). These PDF annotations are then imported by Docear to a mind map. In this mind map you can organize all your annotations into categories, create further nodes and add more text. With the integrated reference manager, bibliographic data can be added to each of the PDF annotations (and all other nodes in the mind map). Subsequently, you can create a new mind map, drag e.g. a research paper, copy your annotations to the draft and if you need more information you just click on the PDF annotation and the PDF will open on the page the annotation was made. Watch this video to get a better idea of what Docear can do (watch it in full-screen mode).

Here is again an overview of the major changes between Docear and its predecessor SciPlore MindMapping.

Freeplane instead of FreeMind

The old SciPlore MindMapping was based on FreeMind, a good and popular but not very well maintained mind mapping software. The new Docear is based on Freeplane, a really exceptional piece of software. Freeplane has many more features compared to FreeMind (e.g. Free floating nodes, displaying images), is faster, more stable and above all: Freeplane has a great plugin system that allows us offering Docear as a plugin for Freeplane. That means, if a new version of Freeplane is released you can just install it and Docear will work with the new version. You do not need to wait until we have adjusted Docear to the new Freeplane version. Also, the Freeplane development team is highly responsive to user feedback. If you have ideas for new features regarding the mind mapping functionality, the Freeplane team will be happy to hear them.

Integrated Reference Manager

Docear has it’s own BibTeX compatible reference manager. Or better said: we fully integrated one of the best available reference managers, namely JabRef. That means you can directly create references in Docear, add them to nodes (even if they don’t have a link to a PDF), edit references in the mind map and they will automatically be changed in the BibTeX file, and you have all the wonderful standard features that JabRef offers. Of course, you can still install JabRef in parallel and work as you are used with SciPlore MindMapping.

Compatibility with other reference Managers

You don’t have to use our integrated reference manager. You can still use any other BibTeX compatible reference manager as well and also our support for Mendeley now is improved. It is no problem to use Mendeley for managing your PDFs (and extract metadata) and use Mendeley’s BibTeX file in Docear.

Workspace

Docear has a “workspace”. We believe this workspace makes Docear much easier to understand for new users. In the workspace you have several mind maps. For instance, one that lists only your new PDF files. Another one is for managing all your annotations, another one for your own publications. Of course you can still create new mind maps for each of your assignments, papers or books you are currently writing. There is also another advantage of having a workspace. All links in mind maps are set relative to the workspace. That means you can move your mind maps within the workspace and all links to PDF files will still work. It also allows you to use your data on several computers with different operating systems.

MS Word plugin

The probably biggest advantage other reference managers such as Zotero and Mendeley have over Docear is their good integration with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. For SciPlore MindMapping we recommended using BibTeX4Word but BibTeX4Word is not very user friendly (neither the installation, nor the use in MS Word, nor installing new citation styles). We are working on a Docear4Word Add-On and hope to have it ready in a few weeks.

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7 Comments

Amazing work – thanks very much for this well though through project. I’m also impressed that you guys have shipped a day early 🙂 – that’s pretty much unheard of.

In any case, I’ve downloaded it and it’s a huge improvement over the bitty-ness of SciPlore, which had a pretty complex workflow for me (Mendeley pain). I’m really looking forward to seeing more of Docear. Well done.

fantastic , one day early ,Today I’ve kept surfing your website all the time to look forward your public version ,and I’ve posted the bug of build27 on the block of bug report . Thanks a lot ,you team are great ,I will keep focus on your website and discuss some new function I can imagine , going forward together ~